Some of you will remember that about 3 years ago (December 2005) my main PC at the time died in a major way, with the PSU going bang and taking the motherboard with it.
Well... you won't believe this! It has happened again!
Today I switched my main PC on to do some design work. It had been running for about 30 minutes and I was just checking through my emails, when suddenly it shut down. No warning. Just turned off.
I tried to power it back on but no response. I disconnected it from the mains, waited a bit and connected it up again. But as soon as I plugged the power in and switched the switch on on the PSU itself the fans all span for a couple of seconds and then went off. That hasn't been a good sign in the past when I've been repairing other's PCs. And it wouldn't power up at all.
So I unplugged it and took the side off, and a nice burnt electrical smell was coming from the PSU, so that was obviously dead! Luckily I had another spare PSU not being used, so I took the dead one out and connected up the new one. Powered it on and the same thing happened. Fans all spun for 2 seconds then the system was dead.
So next I stripped it right down to the Motherboard, CPU, I ram DIMM and the graphics card. Tried to power it but the same happened. Some further tests later and I've now reached the conclusion that the PSU has killed either the graphics card or the motherboard. A friend is posting me an old PCI graphics card so I can test to see if it is the existing PCI-E card that is dead. But I have a feeling it is my nice Asus A8N-SLI Premium board that is dead.
So looks like it is again time to build a new PC using what is left of this now dead system. How annoying.
Has anyone else had a PC die recently? And what happened?